The Cutting Room: A First-Timer's Take

Thursday night was a pretty scary time to be in New York. The thunder and lightning storms that swept across the country made their way to Gotham and landed with a bang. And another bang. And a few wild flashes of lightning.

At TheStreet.com, Assistant Managing Editor John J. Edwards III and I rotate every week as to who is going to be the early editor, and this was my early week. Being the early guy, well, let's just say it's not a good thing. Getting a decent night's sleep is key.

But, thanks to the Gods of Thunder (and a particularly spicy plate of manicotti), sleep did not come easily or quickly. I also had this nagging thought in the back of my mind that this might be the first week that I appear on our weekly television program.

Now, I have pretty much resigned myself to the belief that television is not going to be my bread and butter. I have done it and it's usually gone fine, but at the end of the day, I've never kidded myself. I don't have that TV look, which has so well-served such important thespians as Alan Thicke, John Davidson or Bob Saget.

But, still, I have to admit I was excited at the prospect.

So, when Friday morning rolled around and the worst of the storm clouds had cleared, I woke and readied myself for another day of battle in the middle of TheStreet.com's markets team. It wasn't much of a war, actually. Volume in the stock market is poor and the market -- as Chief Markets Writer Brett Fromson so nicely noted in his What a Week piece -- is feeling and looking bearish.

When I left my apartment I made sure I put an extra shirt (TV standard-issue blue) and tie (yellow) in my bag, just in case the call was made and I was drafted (willingly, I might add) to appear on the show.

Well, it just wasn't going to happen this week.

Fromson, Dave Kansas, Herb Greenberg, Jim Seymour, Ben Holmes and Adam Lashinsky were going to be the guests and Brenda Buttner was going to be keeping this rather unwieldy gang in line, as she does so well every week.

Me? I'm in the control room with Gary Schreier and Alison Moore to try and get a feeling for what goes into making this whole thing work. And these folks were humming. There are more than Gary and Allison, though. There's this whole team of behind-the-scenes people that are yelling, putting on mikes, fitting ear pieces, applying makeup, fixing hair (some hair needs more work than others), checking sound, dressing the sets and calling cues for the producers.

It's a lot of work. And these men and women are real pros.

The show went well, I thought. A couple of times the producers would ask Seymour a question and he would answer verbally instead of just nodding, and they didn't like that too much. Schreier and Moore cracked up Kansas (he recovered pretty nicely, thank you). But these were little things and the crew wasn't at all worried about them.

In general, it was, in fact, a pretty cool half-hour and, if given the chance, I'd go again. The best thing about it, though, was that everybody was having a good time. No matter what you have to do, if you've got talented and funny people around it always seems like fun, and not so much like work.

A Happy Ending

Oh, but guess what? Kansas forgot to bring a tie. That's right, my yellow tie is adorning the neck of Editor-in-Chief Dave Kansas on this week's show.

I think I'll tape the show, and bring it home to show my parents.

If only I'd brought my "Hi, Mom" tie...

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